Elon Musk said today that Tesla will launch “unsupervised full self-driving in Austin as a paid service” in June.
It’s a similar claim that he previously made with a few more details.
During the earnings call following the release of Tesla’s Q4 2024 results today, CEO Elon Musk said:
Tesla will launch unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June.
It is actually in line with what he said during Tesla’s previous earnings call when he claimed Tesla will “launch unsupervised self-driving in California and Texas in Q2.”
Later in today’s call, Musk was asked about California, and he added:
I predict Tesla will launch unsupervised FSD in California later this year, as well as in many other regions of the US.
But the comments about the launch in Austin were more interesting.
First off, he mentioned Austin rather than Texas. Secondly, he said “as a paid service” rather than on the customer fleet, which is what has been promised since 2016.
That would point to Tesla launching a geofenced autonomous ride-hailing service with teleoperation in Austin, which is precisely what Waymo has been offering for years in several cities.
Musk also reiterated that Tesla will not offer unsupervised self-driving until its system is “much safer than human drivers.”
Tesla’s head of FSD, Ashok Elluswamy, previously said that the goal should be for Tesla to achieve miles between necessary disengagement equivalent to human miles driven between collisions, which NHTSA puts at 670,000 miles.
The latest data points to Tesla being at less than 500 miles between necessary disengagement.
Electrek’s Take
Top comment by Michael
The stock behavior just confirms what a lot of us already know: Tesla is a meme stock, and it's priced at a level that has nothing to do with it's financial fundamentals, nor any realistic assessment of its future financials.
I was watching the stock price as Elon started talking to see how it would respond to what he was saying and when he made the comment about unsupervised self-driving in Austin in June, the stock price jumped:
That’s how you know how dumb the market is regarding self-driving because Elon only downgraded is previous statement.
He confirmed that it will be a geofenced service that is not linked to the customer fleet. He is basically talking about launching a Waymo competitor years behind them.
In the meantime, he is hoping that people forget about his promises that all customer vehicles built since 2016 are capable of full self-driving.
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